Hello, my name is gimmepie and sometimes I like to pretend I'm an artist. About four months ago I rather spontaneously bought a tablet and started drawing and actually making an effort to learn and improve (I blame Chura). At this stage I primarily draw female characters but I'm expanding my horizons over in the Kittypie Draws thread. Please feel free to leave constructive commentary, motivational speaking and donations of pie.

Early Attempts

These are a couple of samples of some of the really early attempts, the ones that aren't so horrific I refuse to show you anyway. I learned a hell of a lot about drawing anatomy based on the brutal (but very welcomed) critiques a legion of female artists gave me on these and I think between these and the next few represents the biggest jump in the quality of my work.

Spoiler: A girl stretching in after waking up

Spoiler: A soldier in armour

Character Art

These are drawing's I'm happier with that I completed further on in my artistic journey (I say like I don't still have miles to go). At this point in time they're all drawings centred on female characters, but I'm going to try to work on males more in the future. I like to think there's a pretty significant increase in quality between my earliest stuff and these but I'm still not even close to satisfied with my ability yet.

Spoiler: Chura's character, Brie.

Spoiler: A random woman in blue

Spoiler: The body outline she originated from that I'm really proud of

Spoiler: A homeless woman

Spoiler: My first successful chibi

Spoiler: Chura's character, Phoebe from Kittypie Draws

Spoiler: Fairy's OC from Kittypie Draws

Spoiler: Girl jumping

Pokemon Only

Since this is a Pokemon site and I do, in fact, enjoy the Pokemons, I will sometimes share art of Pokemon. That being said, I don't really draw them a lot since most of my art is of human/humanoid characters at this stage.

Spoiler: Mega Parasect Concept

Landscapes and Scenery

Sometimes I dispense from the character focus and attempt to paint a landscape or will draw an element of scenery. These times are pretty rare but might as well include them.

Hey gimme! I've been putting off writing a proper reply to this thread because I wanted to give you a legitimate series of criticisms that I think may help you improve. But, as is only typical of my luck, once I sat down and finally wrote it PC crashed and I lost the whole thing! So, I'm posting this now as a promise to return with something of substance to say regarding your art. I'm also posting this to say thank you for sharing your artwork with us and that I'm very proud of you for branching out! :) Keep it up!

So, I recently upgraded to CSP from Krita and have been practising there before getting to work on the rest of my Kittypie draws things and these are the results. For the latter one I also changed to a new method of shading Chura taught me which I think looks a lot better.

Spoiler:

Edit: Oops, psyducked some of the shading a bit when i added the sun light

So first, I think it says a lot that this piece is something you're really proud of. It shows me that you know where to start on a drawing and how to realize a figure. That you can draw the skeleton of a character without getting bogged down in the details, like many new artists are compelled to do. But I still think there are things you can improve on here, even in just your line drawing. First, I'd like to see you draw more complex, complete, and dynamic figures - like this. Before going into anything like the face or clothing, I believe just doing some figure drawing will help you smooth out some of the inconsistencies in your anatomy. For instance, in your sketch, the back of the neck more or less vanishes into the shoulder, and the arm in relation to the chest looks off. Plus, it reads very flat. Like a two dimensional character and not something that has weight and volume to it. I think in general just going over anatomy, practicing complex poses, and familiarizing yourself with the human body will drastically improve your art. I think drawing characters of varying body type will help as well.

Second, I think a simple way for you to improve the overall look of your art is to learn more about clothing. Right now, the way you draw clothing is very flat. None of it moves with the characters, pulls or stretches, folds or creases, or anything. It all sits on the character as if you were drawing the clothes as skin. Think more about what direction the clothes are being pulled in and what gravity would do to said clothes. In the girl jumping picture, you've got a character expressing a lot of movement, but almost nothing besides the post suggests that there's anything actually going on. Perhaps, if she's jumping, the bottom of her skirt / shirt would lift slightly, like you have the hair doing a little. They would fold along the middle to conform to what the body is doing, and stretch along the back and chest where it would be pulled tightest. Practicing things like this will add action and make the scene more believable.

Third, shading, shading, shading. I can see where you've tried to add depth, but it's all extremely uniform. Not all shadows will be cast in the same darkness. Try working more gradients into your shadows, where the shading furthest from the light source is darker than the shading closer to the light source. Does that make sense? This also applies to highlighting, which I see very little of in your art. Areas more exposed to the light source would be, understandably, lighter, and stand out more. I believe that working more in black and white will help you find these errors, which you can then bring over to color once you've mastered it a little more.

Lastly, there's some tricks and tips to drawing faces which even anime (mostly) adheres to. Like how eyes are placed about halfway from the top of the head to the jaw. The gap between the eyes is usually the same width as the eye itself. The mouth from end to end should extend as far as each pupil. The ears are on the same plain as the eyebrows. And many things like that! Keeping these proportions in mind and learning little tricks to facial symmetry will not only help how the expressions look, but will extend to the rest of the body as well. You can read more about it here!

I think that's a good place to end this now. All artists have a "long way to go" and neither one of us are exceptions to that. Remember to play with things and experiment and not to limit yourself to your comfort zone. But don't break the rules until you've learned them completely either! I can already see a major difference between your earlier works and your girl jumping picture. You're well on your way so I think you've got a lot to be proud of so far. Just keep practicing and keep having fun. That's the most important thing!

Thank you for such a detailed critique and for the references! I'll be sure to keep checking them while I work on the piece I'm doing currently, although I've already sketched the anatomy part so that might be a bit off still. A couple of questions though, if that's alright.

Clothing: How should I draw for a shirt tucked into something else? In girl jumping the shirt is intended to be tucked into the waistband of the skirt not sitting over the top. I could also do with some tips on just drawing different kinds of clothes in general because honestly it's probably on the list of the top few things I find hardest.

Shading: Is the shading in that same picture more in line with what you're talking about? There's definitely a gradient there since the style of shading there inherently required a gradient. Do I need to make it more pronounced or am I missing something there?

Anatomy: I'm not sure what you meant about the neck and shoulder from your first paragraph? Could you give a bit more detail on that for me?

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